Judy Singer
"The Neurodiversity Movement has its origins in the Autistic Rights Movement that sprung up in the 1990’s. The term neurodiversity was coined in 1998 by an autistic Australian sociologist named Judy Singer, and was quickly picked up and expanded upon within the autistic activist community."https://www.identityfirstautistic.org/the-neurodiversity-paradigm- "Judy Singer started ASpar, the online support group for the children of Autistic parents in 1999. It was a world first: the first space to recognise that Asperger’s children do grow up, and some become parents. This may now seem obvious, but in 1999, the focus was all on children, and the next step hadn’t occurred to anyone. Let alone that some of the characteristics of AS might be problematic for their children." https://aspar.wordpress.com/about/ "As a child, Judy had sought the world over, in literature, in film, and even in psychiatry textbooks, for words to explain her mother’s odd behaviour. Finding nothing, she gave up, and assumed her mother, Agnes, had simply made a choice to be self-centred, invasive, lazy and helpless! But when Judy had a child of her own who began to show similar behaviours to her mother, the penny dropped. It was something hereditary! Since discovering AS, she now has the words she sought: unable to recognise social cues, obsessive, compulsive, perseverative, anxious, short-fused,... There is a happy ending – Judy now understands what Agnes had to contend with as a disabled woman who the world simply did not understand. She respects her mother’s struggles and recognises that at heart Agnes had always been a loving, wholly innocent, trusting human being who could not comprehend her effect on the people around her, or their rejections." Articles http://www.myspectrumsuite.com/meet-judy-singer/ "The rise of neurodiversity takes postmodern fragmentation one step further. Just as the postmodern era sees every once too solid belief melt into air, even our most taken-for granted assumptions: that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way, (unless visibly disabled) – are being dissolved.”" "“Why can’t you be normal for once in your life?” was almost a daily expression of frustration in Singer’s family, and became the title of her chapter in the UK Open University Press book, Disability Discourse, which first bought her work to public notice. Yet it was only when Singer had her own child, with traits similar to her mother’s, that Singer realized that there was some kind of hereditary disability in the family, and that her mother had been struggling to be ‘normal’ all along." https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/495/misdiagnosed-and-misunderstood "[[Neurodiversity]] The word was coined by a sociology student in Australia named Judy Singer. She was a member of one of the first online social groups for people on the autism spectrum. Once these people found each other, they learned that not all their problems with daily living could be blamed on autism. Some were failures of society: for example, the bullying that almost all autistic kids experience. Singer had a mentor who had survived polio and used a wheelchair. He introduced her to what’s called the “social model of disability” — that is, seeing disability as a relationship between the individual and society. She noticed that terms that include “disorder” were inherently pathologizing. Singer wanted to come up with a term that would be judgment-neutral, or even positive, to indicate that these conditions can also convey gifts and advantages. She decided on “neurodiversity,” to draw a comparison with how biodiversity — having a variety of species — contributes to the overall resilience of the environment." References Category:Autism Spectrum Category:Social Science Category:Neurodiversity Category:Neurodivergent People Category:Disabled Rights Category:Disability